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Tag: women

We’ve analysed all of the newly created grant-making trusts (foundations) registered in England and Wales since 2005 – a data set of 2,312 new grant-makers. Our findings are in a new Factary report, ‘Trust Women’, available for download here.

Key Findings:

Boards are not balanced – on average there is just one woman per board across all of these trusts.

Almost one third (29.7%) had all-men boards when they were registered.

Just one trust in five has women in the majority on boards.

And we found some evidence that trusts with women in the majority were poorer at start-up than those with men-majority boards.

Two leading UK venture philanthropy funds are to merge – an interesting move and one which again underlines the clear business-like view of venture philanthropists. It’s a move that many philanthropists will welcome – particularly those who criticise the non-profit sector for duplication of effort.

The only downside is that the new entity’s board – announced in a press-release here http://bit.ly/13SEOxb – is all-male. This ties in with the gender imbalance that we identified in our 2011 report “The Venture Philanthropists,” in which we noted that 80% of board members are men.

In May 2012, Mama Cash launched a report (http://www.mamacash.org/page.php?id=2788) showing that only 4.8% of European foundation spend was directed at women and girls. Could this be in part caused by the male dominance of leadership roles in European foundations?